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Hardware for 2012 Mame cabinet
TJCOMBO:
I am building a MAME cabinet and I am not up to date on what is new these days with MAME and computer hardware.
What is a good low cost/ high performance, efficient computer hardware option for MAME? I would like to play almost all games that are fully playable, definitely the mid and late 90s fighters and the latest games.
Intel Desktop Board D525MW
SD Card and adaptor
M350-universal-mini-itx-enclosure
What version of MAME? And is TinyXP a good OS to use?
paigeoliver:
Tinyxp doesn't support the latest hardware.
The best cost to performance ratio on mame is to grab someone's old computer out of their basement and give them $1 for it, basically everything other than the 3D stuff was running full speed on current hardware 10 years ago on the mame version from 10 years ago. The real world difference is laughably small between an old 800 mhz pc with an old .60 mame version and a brand new gaming computer computer with the latest mame version.
The fact is that mame still isn't quite THERE with the 3D stuff and even what does work right largely requires specialty analog driving controls. There have been hundreds of incremental emulation improvements made, but most are essentially invisible to the end user. Thousands of titles have been added, but 98 percent of them are mahjong, clones, gambling, fruit machines, and terrible rare early games. The other 2 percent added is largely 3d driving games.
If there is absolutely anywhere that you can skimp in your build it is with the PC you use. Spend your budget on everything else, use a freebie computer and then upgrade it later.
--- Quote from: TJCOMBO on June 28, 2012, 03:53:11 pm ---I am building a MAME cabinet and I am not up to date on what is new these days with MAME and computer hardware.
What is a good low cost/ high performance, efficient computer hardware option for MAME? I would like to play almost all games that are fully playable, definitely the mid and late 90s fighters and the latest games.
Intel Desktop Board D525MW
SD Card and adaptor
M350-universal-mini-itx-enclosure
What version of MAME? And is TinyXP a good OS to use?
--- End quote ---
brad808:
If you do decide to go the way of a 10 year old free computer just make sure you know what your getting yourself into. 800mhz machines may be fine to play old mame games but you definitely won't be able to use hyperspin (a highly recommended "up to date" front end). I loaded up mame on a pentium 4 2.4ghz machine and mame ran ok on it but the rest of the computing experience as far as menus, wait time for loading etc was such a joke I wouldn't put it in my mame machine. I would have taken a hammer to it within a week out of shear frustration from it being so slow.
I ended up spending just under $150 and I found that to be a pretty good "sweet" spot myself. That gave me an intel celeron 2.5ghz 2 core processor (e3300) with a minimum motherboard (1 ram slot, 1 pci slot, which is all I needed) (Foxconn G41S-K), 2 gig of ram, and powersupply. That played everything supported in the newest version of mame except for the most demanding usual suspects like the blitz, gauntlet legends, newer tekkens, etc. More importantly windows ran a dream on it and hyperspin didn't take 20-30 seconds to show the next game in a list :-[
Just recently I upgraded to a dual core 4.0ghz machine to be able to play the newer games. 3d fighters, blitz, the new cave sh3 shmups, tekkens all play awesome and I couldn't be happier. Upgrading probably added a bit more the 25 games from not running to running. For me it was worth it because I play the hell out of those games but for others I could see where they wouldn't justify it. The reason why you see so many people asking why games like blitz run like crap is because people actually want to play them.
TJCOMBO:
I do want Hyperspin on my computer and quick boot times. The games that are an absolute must are the MK and KIs. I know the older games will work just fine on an older computer, as I remembering playing them 15 years ago on a x486 in MAME.
The $150 setup looks like a good one. Would something like a Dell GX270 work or is that inadequate?
How much would it cost for a system these days to get those newer games, 3d fighters, etc up and running? I enjoy those, but if it's not within my budget then I will pass for now.
ABACABB:
One additional consideration is your operaing system. If you can, get Windows7 64 bit. The 64 bit operating system can give a 10-15% performance increase (on 3D games) over a 32 bit system with the exact same hardware.